Periodic orbits in Large Eddy Simulation of Box Turbulence

Abstract

We describe and compare two time-periodic flows embedded in Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of turbulence in a three-dimensional, periodic domain subject to constant external forcing. One of these flows models the regeneration of large-scale structures that was observed in this geometry by Yasuda et al. ({\sl Fluid Dyn. Res.} {\bf 46}, 061413, 2014), who used a smaller LES filter length and thus obtained a greater separation of scales of coherent motion. We speculate on the feasibility of modelling the regenerative dynamics with time-periodic solutions in such a flow, which may require novel techniques to deal with the extreme ill-conditioning of the associated boundary value problems.